Chris Matthews: Why do people dislike Obama when he's never done anything wrong?

Via NRO and John Ekdahl, Matthews has made this point many times before, usually with references to Horatio Alger, but it feels extra special after a long week of President Perfect completely betraying the Hopenchange ethos of his first presidential campaign. It’s not the cheap racial demagoguery that gets me here; that’s par for the course both for him and his network, where you’ll find far dumber examples of it than this. What gets me is that a guy who’s spent his adult life in politics reacts to the dynamics of ideological differences and partisanship like a college student would. Righties dislike O because he’s a statist liberal, and sometimes an aggressive one; if Hillary wins, she’ll be hated for the same reason. Obama’s personal behavior is better than lots of pols’, but plenty of politicians who are more or less decent people in their personal conduct are roundly hated by the other team. Paul Ryan’s a nice guy with a lovely family whom the lefty commentariat loathes because they think he wants to kill grandma. Marco Rubio also seems like a decent person with a nice family; he’ll be the second coming of Hitler in 2016 to the left if he’s the nominee, his shilling for immigration reform notwithstanding. Many people who know Mitt Romney will tell you he’s a warm, generous guy in person; he’s lived cleanly too, apart from his unforgivable crime of making lots and lots of money in business. (Note Matthews’s reference to “money-grubbing” in the clip. For shame, Mitt.) All of them already are or will be regarded by liberals as monsters, not because they have any deep objection to them as people but because they’re roadblocks on the path to the society liberals want America to be. That’s politics. When you know the way to paradise, everyone in your way is the devil. And every single person reading this grasps that already. So how is it the guy who doesn’t, who shrieks like a five-year-old over political animosities, has his own TV show?

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Look on the bright side. As bad as this is, it probably doesn’t crack MSNBC’s bottom 10 of the week. That’s a low, low bar.

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David Strom 6:40 PM | April 18, 2024
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